What video game movie curse? It may have had questionable trailers and a very muted sense of hype, but with Tomb Raider, Alicia Vikander has finally done what Michael Fassbender, Angelina Jolie and 50 percent of Paul W. S. Anderson’s entire career couldn’t: she’s made a good video game movie.Much of Tomb Raider‘s success does lie on the Swedish Oscar winner. She is inspirational to Wonder Woman levels as Lara Croft, showing a quaking physicality and adeptness that due to its everyday origins inspires more than your random super soldier or God. This is a protagonist you care for; her struggles defy privilege backgrounds and smarmy city-traversing cycling games to be immediately relatable. But a good character does not a good movie make. After all, Angelina Jolie was pretty spot on for her different era take on Lady Croft and it’s nigh impossible to watch either of her outings with a straight face.Read More: Alicia Vikander Makes A Better Lara Croft Than Angelina JolieMake no mistake, Tomb Raider 2018 is all around a pretty great movie. It’s exhilarating, affecting, surprising and fun. There are issues for sure – in particular, there are strangely choppy tonal transitions between scenes and some of the meatier aspects away from Lara could have done with more exploration – but no more than you’d find in any other action adventure movie. And that is the key to how Tomb Raider breaks the video game movie curse: it’s not a video game movie.This Page: The Unspoken Problem With Video Game Movies
Video Game Movies Suck Because We Treat The Them Like Video Games
Explaining why video game movies don’t work has been done to death and isn’t really conducive to the discussion. A lot of the oft-stated reasons – movies lack the autonomy of games, no depth in the source, anything to do with too much or too little accuracy – are valid for an individual project, yet superficial if we’re talking about the full situation; they’re no less true of movies based on books, which run the full gamut of quality. While simplistic, though, the autonomy point – that a film can’t match the involvement of a game because you’re not in control, essentially turning the movie into a feature-length cutscene – does reveal a mentality that explains the problem. Games are treated as too literal a source.
“Video game” is not a genre. It’s a medium. To even use the phrase “video game movie” is to defeat a film because it is immediately defined by its source. There are as many genres of video games as there are any other artform (more, in anything, given the variance of playstyle) and yet we never treat their adaptations with the same weight. Historical-sci-fi-action-adventure Assassin’s Creed raises the same question as high-fantasy-epic Warcraft. If you used similar logic, then any movie based on a book should be measured alongside all others, be the source E.L. James or Stephen King.
The best counter-example here is comic books. Due to their pulp origins, movies based on graphic novels used to lumped in together. And while they still are to a degree thanks to superhero blockbusters dominating, things have evolved. Crucially, the methodology by which they’re adapted is different: Marvel and DC famously don’t lift direct stories from the page, rather distilling the character, ideals and core story and finding a way to work it on screen. Success here is defined less by the medium of origin and more the skill of the filmmakers. We’re now at a point where even superhero movies traverse genres – between The Dark Knight to Thor: Ragnarok is a gulf that defies comparison.
Related: Why Are Video Game Adaptations (Still) Failing?
The fact that you can usually tell source-unseen if a film is based on a video game is the intrinsic problem here. Everyone – from studio execs to directors to marketers to audiences – all treat video game movies as a set type, and they inevitably follow the same adaptation rules. It’s not about making a film from the game, but making the game into a film: facsimiles of the experience in a different form. Directors recreate the specific gameplay trick as a selling point, lift what vague story they can from a limited pool (until recently video game movies came from games with slight narratives) and fill the rest with whatever basic world they can cook up. Look at King of Bad Video Game Movies Super Mario Bros., which stretches the princess-saving to breaking point, only pausing for a bizarre jumping scene. Few have done it as bad, but almost all – even financially successful cases like Resident Evil – have followed the rule.
That’s why movies inspired by video games in an abstract sense – Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle – capture the feeling without any of the weighings down. They’re building from a different direction, adding flavor rather than having it be the full meal. That’s something Tomb Raider is much closer to.
Tomb Raider Is A Film First, Video Game Movie Second
The most dominant thing that Tomb Raider takes from the video games isn’t any of the ephemera. Director Roar Uthaug (and screenwriters Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Alastair Siddons) looked at the game’s 2013 reboot and treated it like you would a novel; he distilled it down to its core, then made a movie around it. We meet Lara inspired by her father’s endeavors to travel out to the mysterious island of Yamatai, only to crash and forced to fight for survival against a violent group of amoral men trapped on the island and obsessed with finding the remains of Japanese Queen Himiko. The whys of each step is changed – the character roster is smaller, the complications ran across on the island simpler – yet the whats are clearly there; it’s not narrative, it’s story.
What really makes Tomb Raider different to all of the others is its understanding of its protagonist. Alicia Vikander’s Lara Croft is clearly built from the game, an everywoman mentally and physically tortured by her experiences on the island to emerge a confident hero, and it puts stock in what really matters: her immense capability and Daddy issues. The choice to do an origin may feel old hat by this point, but it ensures there’s development to unpack; Tomb Raider treats its main character as a character, giving her a founding arc.
Read More: Our Review of Tomb Raider
None of this is what you typically expect from a “video game movie“. Of course, Tomb Raider has an obvious advantage in that the game is already highly cinematic. It tells a character-driven narrative with dynamically shot cutscenes and plenty of third-person action that shows the eyes of a keen cinematographer. To make a good movie from this is easier than a 2D game of birds being flung at egg-stealing pigs, but that shouldn’t take away from the decision to go this way, nor the effectiveness of which it’s achieved.
Tomb Raider Shows How To Adapt A Video Game
All that said, there’s no avoiding Tomb Raider very much lifts from the 2013 game on which it’s based like any other “video game movie“, with lots of gameplay specific nods. Most of the key action sequences – Lara climbing around a rusted plane before falling out and only saved by a parachute, her emotional first kill, running and gunning with a bow-and-arrow, and of course the slightly-too-simplistic tomb puzzles – are pretty much direct lifts from the source (the main action element the film introduces is hand-to-hand combat, something the game frankly could have done with). Beyond that, there’s an abundance of pretty overt callouts. Certain shots are total remakes, other directly evoke the notorious quick time events – including Lara repeatedly dangling from an edge with one hand – and the pickaxe is almost as iconic to this new-age Croft as dual pistols was to Angelina Jolie’s.
Between set pieces, plot setup, and general aesthetic, Tomb Raider‘s style is imbued with the game’s DNA to an almost fan-bait degree. Yet for all the brushings – both movie and game have a key third-act pivot about a helicopter arriving – this doesn’t feel pandering. There’s the sense the filmmakers have played and studied the game not to just understand what’s popular but what it means.
If we’re treating this as a story to adapt, the choices made become clear in what was changed. There’s no attempted rape in Lara’s first kill, and the punishment Vikander goes through pales in comparison to what the player’s avatar endures. And, in two big alterations to game canon, Lara’s father is alive on the island and Himiko is a plague carrier rather than a weather temptress. Each of those adjustments shifts away from something arguably fundamental, yet makes the movie’s story more believable: rape is too dark for a PG-13 (and unnecessary); breaking Lara would stretch credibility more than the film already does; her father being an active part gives more agency; and evil spirits tank any believability.
Related: Tomb Raider Lifts A Huge Plot Twist From Uncharted
Most of what Tomb Raider gets right is not remarkable. Uthaug has made an above-average action movie with one kick-ass protagonist. Its successes – Junkie XL’s score deserves a shout-out – and failures – the movie is far too desperate to set up a sequel – operate independent of it being based on a video game. That is the key, and what makes a good movie great.
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